


This Is The Hand

by Swamp_Cat



Category: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)
Genre: Multi, au- pax is real and he has been ruining stefan butlers life for 18 years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25776970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swamp_Cat/pseuds/Swamp_Cat
Summary: Stefan Butler accepts his own tragic, young, pushed-to-the-brink-by-insanity death at the tender age of about 11 going on 12.
Relationships: Stefan Butler/Colin Ritman, Stefan Butler/Kitty/Colin Ritman
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	This Is The Hand

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in my docs since the show came out. I'm pretty sure I'm done with it. Enjoy, you beautiful slimy hairless creatures. Title is from Laurie Anderson's Superman, which I think literally made me shit my pants when it played in the show. I love Laurie.

Stefan Butler accepts his own tragic, young, pushed-to-the-brink-by-insanity death at the tender age of about 11 going on 12. 

It had been a Sunday. 

He was on his first read through of Bandersnatch by Jerome F. Davies who had not yet murdered his wife. Stefan had no mother. He was about to meet Pax. 

He considers himself (although he tries not to consider himself) to be of a kind of latent Romantic influence. This is because the sixth grade unit for european literature included both the vocabulary word “melancholy” and a biography of Edgar Allan Poe’s life. It was one of the first times he resonated with another person and it had made him sort of insufferably obsessive for awhile. He began to ask more questions about his mother, which had led to his overall not Romantic nor melancholy father to, tight lipped, deliver a box of old belongings silently to his door. 

Stefan hated him sometimes. 

This phase of his began but did not conclude the developing certainty of tragic, poignant death, (for some reason by a vague and ravaging consumption in most half-cocked daydreams), but he felt even three weeks from his 12fth birthday a sort of closing sensation. When he thought of the future, beyond such unfathomable numbers like 20 and even 55, he saw a black void in his mind. There was a wall within himself he could not pierce, and never having had to confront the idea that he had a self, let alone a part of the self he could not access, it changed him greatly. 

What sealed and cauterized this change was the book. Or, more accurately, the sunday of which Stefan reached page 207. The page Jerome F. Davies introduces the Thief of Destiny and asks you to worship him. 

Stefan, you see, he was melancholy. He chose yes. 

_

The first thing Pax claims is that for one, the book is rubbish, and for two, he is not in any way responsible for any of his actions within nor whatever actions the book inspires. Stefan thinks through his haze of abject terror and disbelief that he sounds like a stuffy lawyer on the TV court dramas. Mostly, though, he thinks of how Pax is terribly, ridiculously blue. And slimey. And a nightmare creature made of bone and smelling of bile. 

_

“I knew your mother,” Pax says one day, horribly. 

The quivering child attempting to hide in the corner of his room is beginning to feel more hysterically enraged than scared. “You knew my mum?” 

Pax grins, terribly. “Yes,” he says. “Would you like to hear all about the embarrassing things she did when she was your age?”

_

It starts to come when Stefan is not alone. 

At first, it’s just his dad, and that is easy. His dad is remarkably stupid and thinks that Stefan is already neurotic anyway. 

This is also when Stefan learns that Nobody Else can see Pax, and that he is what most professionals would refer to as batshit insane. 

The certainty draws itself even tighter around him. 

_ 

One day, Pax visits him in school. 

Certain events come to pass in reaction to this which Pax will eternally shirk all responsibility for and that Stefan will refer to as nothing except “The Incident”, and then only ever in the confines of his mind. 

_

**1984**

He drops acid with The Actual Colin Ritman. 

Words do not go far enough to follow him there. 

What there is- fireworks. Fire, just fire, and light, but like in the calmest of births, light through the womb, fire like you’re made of fire. A spiritual fire in his mouth, in his throat, lighting up his eyes and the juice of his god damned  _ soul,  _ while all at once this terrific lightness. Terrible forgiveness. 

Colin is speaking and it flows through him less like language and more like they are exchanging that fire. All at once, fluent with each other. All at once, as though they know each other and person-hood is just a silly game they play trying to one up the other. 

Colin plays it well. He is intense. Relentless. Sometimes his intentions feel like a bullet train going so fast and it seems all Stefan can do is sit and wait for the news to come on with the announcement of the derailment. 

Something about Colin is scary. Or at least, there’s something there like the shadow of fear, like grooves left by evil moving through- in the face and shoulders. It makes him look sort of stiff. On the acid, though, he begins to realize it doesn’t frighten him at all. It’s almost kind of silly. 

Colin holds his face.  _ I’ve given you the tools,  _ he says, and Stefan gets distracted thinking  _ God, you could give Pax a run for his money,  _ and ultimately answers the important sounding question rather late. Colin nods, though, looking imperative, looking like a person could be a drop in another person's stomach. 

Colin takes him into the balcony and with a shattering clarity, Stefan, higher than a kite, feels some kind of ancient, stale betrayal. He stops. He stands in the doorway. Colin says  _ those words.  _ Colin puts  _ those hands _ on the ledge. 

Stefan gets the feeling that he’s done this before and it’s just as unfair now as it was then.

More things happen in the span of seconds than he can really describe although there is one resounding thought-  _ you  _ dick- and one memory, which can’t be his, of baby Pearl. Just her little infant warmth, her sighs. Stefan sighs while he feels it go through him. 

Colin waits. 

_

**1983**

“Stop it. He doesn’t like boys.” 

Pax grumbles in a vaguely mucousy way and wipes some excess slime on Stefan's pillow, who only sighs and turns back to his PC. “That’s disgusting,” he tells him. Pax pretends not to hear. Or maybe he really doesn’t hear. One never knows when he is “tuning into another timeline”- as he puts it. 

“If he’s mean to you, I’ll just eat him. Like the other one.” 

“Like the other-“ Stefan’s spinning back around already because nothing ever fucking gets done when Pax is visiting. “You ate someone?” 

“You  _ eat people?”  _

Pax simply raises a bony eyebrow, hands clasped at his torso. Like he couldn’t be bothered. 

Ponce. 

“You’re fucked,” Stefan says. In the end, though, still just turning back to his computer and booting it up. 

If he’s honest, he can’t even begin to wonder who exactly Pax could’ve eaten. There’s too many jackasses floating around his peripheral memory for assholishness, and once he realized it didn’t really matter what he did to make it stop and it was more of a biological prey marker, he ceased paying attention. 

Maybe Pax was mistaking the timeline and it was his dad he ate, chewed up and cooking in his tangled inter-dimensional innards. That’d be a laugh. 

_

**1984**

“Your choice,” Colin says; and the universe lets out a deep rumbling laugh. Stefan feels the liquid soup of his bones melting just a little bit more into the couch. 

“Make it for me,” he says. 

“What?” Colin replies. Stefan knows if he were with anyone else he’d be thinking  _ you queer fucking idiot.  _ It’s miraculous how much he doesn’t. It’s as though he can feel Colin’s words more than he can understand them, more than he can hear them. Colin says  _ what  _ and Stefan feels  _ are you sure?  _ vibrate all the way into his bones. He giggles. Looks at him and his frozen-on-the-TV face, all its rocky hard lines. 

“Make it for me.” 

**_**

**1984**

“The past is immutable.”

“That’s your opinion.” 

He punches Colin in the face. Immediate restart. 

_ 

**1984**

“The past is immutable.” 

“That’s your opinion.” 

Boiling with rage. 

“You’re of a fucking opinion. You’re fucking bullshit, you-“ rage rises into nausea. “You think you’ve got everything but all you fucking care about getting right is the gritty bits. The, the - gotcha! anti- anti, fucking  _ innocence _ gritty bits and you think you’re the fucking smartest person in the world because you can tell  _ stupid  _ kids like-“ 

Something overloads the video memory. 

He ends up retching into the toilet with a violence that scares Kitty out of her nap. 

He can’t figure out how he got into the bathroom. Colin and him had been in the Acid Room (dubbed so by Stefan) while they were yelling at each other. But the bathroom floor is there, gleaming white linoleum, inexplicably, and so is the toilet, thankfully. 

Somehow, they all end up packed into the tight space together, stroking hands intermittently in his hair and on his back and the touches could be some grace of water angel for all that he’s aware. 

He doesn’t know why they’re there, but he does know it just won’t  _ stop,  _ and at least ten minutes in with only a two minute break between heaving he’s thinking he’ll never ever get worked up again in his entire life if it means he never has to come back to this. But. Still. There’s a hand in his hair, behind his ear. A cool hand. 

Eventually there’s only breathing, cheekbone aching against the porcelain of the seat. Colin runs the water in the tap on an old shirt and tries to give it to Stefan, but when he lifts an arm it jostles him so bad he starts retching again. Colin puts the shirt around his neck. The sensation is an overwhelming, god-like relief. It goes all the way through him. 

With an endless gratitude this is when Pax speaks and so any startling Stefan does is hidden under the cover of adjusting to the shirt. 

“It’s because you’ve stopped taking your medication.” 

He sounds like his fucking dad. 

Stefan groans. Kitty shushes him, terribly soft. This makes him laugh but it sort of just sounds like more groaning. 

Pax, when he looks, is standing bare inches from Colin’s shoulder, arms crossed and stance very insufferable. He barely fits into the room. The walls warble and buckle against his awful, vivid blueness. Stefan closes his eyes again. 

“You can’t go off a dosage that high without withdrawal. Dr. Hayes told you that, actually. So this was pretty monumentally idiotic.” 

Stefan hasn’t seen Pax since the last time the infamous Dr. Hayes upped his infamous dosage- a thought which Pax intercepts with complete disregard for  _ personal space.  _

“Yes,” he says. Garbles. It almost sounds like he’s coming from inside the toilet bowl. “That bitch is onto us.” Stefan clenches his hands. 

“Don’t call her that,” He chokes out, and Kitty and Colin are there immediately. 

“What’d you say, babe?” Kitty asks. Her thumb swiping the small hairs just in front of his ear. Her voice is sweet on that word, babe. He feels like one when she says it. And Colin, Colin is crouched right by her, looking for all the world like he really fucking cares. Stefan just shakes his head at her. No need to open this particular bottle of crazy just yet. 

“You don’t even like Dr. Hayes,” Pax says, with glee, because they’ve done this before. Rather softly, Stefan thinks, doesn’t mean she’s earned disrespect, don’t be such a dick, etc. and so on. He’s much too wrung out to get into it. 

_

**1985**

  
  


“You're right,” Colin says, voice flat. “I don’t fucking believe you.” 

Stefan sighs reflexively. 

_ Lets play a joke,  _ Pax says, from the inside of his head because he was a twat.  _ Lets play a joke lets play a joke lets play a joke lets -  _ Christ that felt like bleeding through the eyes _ \- play a joke - _

Everything seems to shimmer with pressure.  _ Lets play a joke, a funny joke, lets-  _ Stefan reaches up to touch his own temple, or maybe he was just staring very hard in one place, because Colin is saying words still and it is absolutely unintelligible.  _ Lets play a joke lets play a joke on Colin I hate Colin -  _

Who seems agitated. Stefan commiserates silently as he projects _fine fine fine fine fine FINE FINE FINE PAX I SWEAR TO_ GOD- backwards to the source, the amount of satisfaction returned to the gesture quite like throwing lines of yarn at a backyard bonfire. The roaring mounts until Stefan thinks he can feel something hot like bathwater start to pour down his face. It peaks and then dissolves with an audible _pop._

Stefan can hear again. The TV was on in the living room. There was a general sound of air. Colin was not speaking. He was looking, very hard, at the space right over Stefans right shoulder, mouth ajar. 

“Hello, Colin Ritman,” The Thief of Destiny said. 

Stefan laughs. 

_

**1979**

He woke up nauseous. 

This was a fairly rote state of being so he just got up and pulled fresh pants on- stared out the window for a good five minutes to give the spots in his vision a chance to dissipate. Then stood there for another ten just because it was sort of hard to break that kind of way. 

His dad was calling his name from downstairs and he didn't call back- also rote. Went to the bathroom. Stared at his left eye in the mirror and waited for it to do something it wasn’t supposed to, which it never did, which was boring, so he took his meds and drank some water from the tap like a dog before pissing and then standing at the top of the stairs and thinking about just how much he would rather leap from the window of his second story bedroom. And how much he would never ever do that. 

_ Don’t sit down,  _ he thinks,  _ You will never get up.  _

He goes downstairs. 

_

**1982**

The bell rings. 

“Aren’t kids your age supposed to be reading porn or something?” 

Stefan puts Bandersnatch away. Pax snickers. 

_

**1985**

Thakur is groaning about work ethic again and they two can hear him between the thin press-board walls. Colin giggles. He doesn’t do that often and predictably when he does it is raw diamonds in the folds of Stefan’s brain- so, so typical. 

Sometimes it feels like this is their work. Laying, feet jutting out on the floor with just their heads across from the other. The half finished theories and never ending ideas about new games, new stories, or even complete hack job bullshit which is some of the funnest because they’ll even do it sober. Talk complete nonsense to each other. And it’s like a language- it’s a bloody fucking language. 

_

**1984**

“Is everything so constantly fucking dire with you?”

The wind howls. The world is a hollow tin can.  Colin’s face remains stony in that inwardly folded way. He shrugs. Shapes are moving behind his eyes, though. Stefan knows it. Derisively, acidly, he laughs. 

“Well, I’m going to, uh,” His derisiveness falls. He wobbles miserably. “Go home.” 

The wind howls between the chasms of apartments and condos, sharp and blackish. 

“You have fun. I guess.”

He’s actually still tripping for the entire walk out of the apartment. As it turns out, he doesn’t remember how he got to Colin’s place, and remembers only halfway through that realization that his dad had driven him to Dr. Hayes in the car. And he doesn't have his bus pass. 

He does not think about Colin or what he is doing or where he is. If he’s still alive, if he’s still falling. If there's somewhere where he’s always still falling. 

Its 3 am and he ends up sitting on a damp wooden bench facing the road. The sodium lights swim like tiny minnows caught in a ray of light, up through the street, back down again, on their own track. Mesmerizing. He thinks about overloading the video memory and Colin’s eyes melting out of his head. He thinks about Thakur and how he should at least start smoking menthol's because his cigars make him smell like shit. He thinks about Joy Division and the Eurythmics and Tangerine Dream and a whole bunch of other music comes in, too, he’s hearing things in bus screeches and thunking dumpster lids, thinks, _ I should put this in the game.  _ Wishes he had a tape recorder on hand, so he could bottle it forever. 

Time winds on in the forms of sound, sirens whining long threads through the hours. People walk by, sparingly.  Soon there is a more immediate marching rhythm. The footsteps are a staccato, tense and mounting noise under his eyes. The orchestra of night sounds whirl to focus on the so small tempo. Like a pool of water going down the drain. It stops to his left. It smells like roll ups. 

It says, “You done then, yeah?” 

Stefan keeps his eyes closed. He leans his body back and lets wet wood seep and prickle through layers of clothes and onto his skin. “Are you?” 

“Am I what?” 

Silence. He re-calibrates since the first question apparently wasn’t an option. The cuticle of his left ring finger snags on fabric, his hands are moving, although he couldn’t be pressed to remember why. There’s a weightlessness to the world and a giddy sense of flight, of no control that’s also all control. Like a gravity of the mind. 

“Are you real?” he asks. 

When he opens his eyes, Colin is in front of him, looking at him. It startles Stefan because he thought he was standing slightly to the left, and he has to move his eyes to see him

properly. Colin has his gaze on. The speaking one, the one that tries to rifle through you. Wind blows. Hands in pockets, and no roll up lit, which makes him seem almost apologetic. He looks to the right, like a glance around, while he takes his hands out of his pockets- begins to take off his coat. 

“Come on up then,” Colin says, in a bit of a constipated way. Stefan watches him. His eyes are safe in their frames and for the most part don’t do much but float upwards a bit. The beds of his fingernails where they hold the coat seem to catch more light than they should- prismic. 

Stefan smiles. 

“No.”

Colin looks at him, right in the mouth, it feels like. Nothing particularly erotic in the gesture as it is intense. Meaningful. There is a meaning behind every shadow in the park, all of it smoking with intention. Stefan would love to stay. 

Colin helps him stand, somehow, and he has to untangle his legs very fast because he didn’t know they were crossed like that. He giggles, and feels as choked as he feels as though every single mechanism of his body has been replaced by jelly. They have a bit of a tussle when Colin tries to give him the coat because Stefan considers it some kind of physical metaphor for legal entrapment and Colin says Stefan is shaking and looks like a crackhead, and no one’s going to let them on the bus like that. 

“They let crackheads on the bus all the time,” Stefan argues a good five minutes past the subject's expiration. Colin says nothing, but laughter clings to him, in his hard glances and blunt hands. Stefan thinks,  _ that’s amazing.  _ He thinks,  _ laughter has hands.  _

On the bus Colin has to keep hissing at Stefan to shut up. Eventually he ends up pressing his face into his hands, trying to calm the peals of giggling, only to glance up at Colin’s shitty grimace that’s obviously just a smile trying not to be a smile and breaks down all over again. At one point, Colin even ducks down his head, and from where he’s stooped he can see an actual grin. With  _ teeth.  _ It reminds him of Pax and it is frighteningly good. 

_

**1984**

“Great sound chip, the Commodore,” Colin says. Stefan could really just punch him in the mouth. 

“Yeah, well,” Stefan edges. “I don’t have one. What's this.” He disregards the glance Colin and Thakur share. It’s been a long loop. They all lean in when the monitor starts up anyway because script is script and Stefan probably could punch Colin in the mouth and still end up muttering  _ eyeballs overloaded the video memory  _ while knocking him out of his chair. 

_

**1984**

They’re sitting in the acid room in varying stages of undoneness. Kitty is awake but seems mostly unaware, deeply plugged into her headphones and walkman. Colin says she goes somewhere else like that and he means it literally.  The man himself is what appears to be unconscious, slumped artfully half on the floor and half on the leather couch in a nest of blankets. 

Stefan is probably the most awake and with customary paranoid vigilance takes it upon himself to speak to the authorities if they happen to arrive, despite the fact he is currently holding a lit spliff and taking absent minded drags. A thought occurs. 

“Nobody ever says ‘perpendicular realities’.” 

Colin shifts, drowsy, but apparently not asleep. A half formed word. “What?” 

“Well, it’s always parallel realities this, parallel realities that,” Stefan starts, beginning to realize he’s quite high, “but how come we never talk about perpendicular realities?” 

This gets Colin’s fully woken attention. He moves into a sitting position. “Hm.” he grunts. “I suppose perpendicular realities must be rather different from our own. Perhaps incomprehensibly so.” That magnanimous brow of his begins to furrow, and he pushes his glasses further up his nose without ever seeming to focus his eyes on one thing. Stefan smiles. It’s still fun to get him working. He takes another drag and then passes it to Colin across the coffee table. 

“No,” he says. “That’d be, like, skewed realities. Totally random lines. At least, from a geometric standpoint. Perpendicular realities, they, they’d be,” 

“I see, I see,” Colin says not so much interrupting as finishing Stefan’s thoughts. Reading his mind. He smiles again. “Somehow symmetric. And even- intersecting.” They look at each other, eyes wide. Stefan knows he’s grinning and feels wild for it, just wild, holding eyes with Colin and smiling at him. 

In another room, Pearl begins to cry. The moment softens but somehow does not end. 

“C’mon,” Colin says. “She’s probably hungry.” 

She was hungry, so Stefan stands with Colin after putting out the spliff for good while he heats up formula in a pan. He’d given Stefan Pearl to hold and she is a precious, warm weight. She also makes him feel even more like a psych ward because really, Colin, handing Stefan the baby? 

But he doesn’t get the shakes so much anymore and Kitty hands off Pearl with the practicality of a sack of potatoes these days so he knows all about where to support the head and torso and so on. He bounces her lightly to keep her from getting restless.

Mid morning light beams through the kitchen windows, golden. It illuminates the dust motes, the Formica kitchen table, paints tidy little window-frame squares of light upon Colin’s lower torso, his arms, his ankle. It catches his hair in places, with which flamboyant bleach blondness takes it and fills itself up as though a prism. Stefan watches him without thinking of it. 

Something miraculous happens, too- Colin glances back at him, and he smiles, the closed mouth smile that says he’s thinking. And then he watches Stefan back. One hand on the pan handle, body twisted, he watches Stefan watch him and Stefan, he is not even afraid. He puts his hand on Pearls head and he looks right at him in those golden squares of light. 

Together, they do a little sigh. Even Pearl, in her sleepy baby daze, takes in and releases a tiny puff of air. It feels like the world breathing. 

_

**1984**

He’s found a way to circumvent control. 

“You want Thai? We’ve got a menu brochure I think,” Kitty says. 

Stefan does want Thai and bites his lip in a practiced way. Pax appears to his left smiling that insufferable smile. 

“You choose.” 

Kitty smirks at him. Both of them think it’s funny, like a quirk. Kitty especially ever since- well. 

She takes particular relish in making Stefan’s choices for him. Stefan is just amazed there’s someone in the world who knows what he wants more than he can say it, and that it feels good, trusting them too. 

  
  


_

**1979**

“Drunken noodle, was it?” 

“You know this isn’t real Thai food, right?”

“Hmm?” Stefan's dad glances up once. 

“It’s Americanized.” 

“Hmm?” 

“Nothing.” 


End file.
